


Looking Back, Looking Ahead

by AmnesiaticRoses



Category: One Piece
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Family History, Gen, Just a Friendly Chat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-28
Updated: 2019-10-28
Packaged: 2021-01-05 01:07:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21205781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmnesiaticRoses/pseuds/AmnesiaticRoses
Summary: Usopp is 100% cool with the fact that his dad left when he was just a kid. Yup. No issues at all with that. So Robin just decides to have a friendly chat.





	Looking Back, Looking Ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Set sometime during the Whole Cake arc. Dedicated to those who urged me to finally post this publicly.

The discussion had started over breakfast, continued through the day, and now had kept going to the point where Zoro, at least, was just getting tired of jawing about it.

"Wasn't he sorta like a dad for Luffy?" Franky asked. "If he's there, and he's that important to Luffy, shouldn't we pay our respects? And let him know what Luffy's up to?" Franky was leading the charge on this particular push. Zoro didn't exactly understand the particular brand of sentimentality the shipwright excelled in, but since the detour probably wouldn't add more than half a day to the trip, he supposed it didn't matter.

And he wasn't wrong. If Luffy were here, Zoro thought it probably wouldn't even be a question. The Red Hair Pirates were said to be on an island they'd be sailing right by. There were a few supplies they could pick up there, if they wanted an excuse. If he were here, Luffy would probably want to be over there in a heartbeat. But Luffy _wasn't_ here, and while Shanks would no doubt like to hear what he was doing (or... well, maybe not, given that Luffy was currently antagonizing Big Mom), Zoro didn't personally feel like taking the detour to speak with him.

But Zoro could see positives of both sides. If they delayed, Luffy and his team might catch up and they could hopefully have the full crew together for the first time in what felt like ages. Zoro had a feeling they'd need that, given what it sounded like they were facing. But on the other hand, they had something to do and it wasn't going to get done if they went to Sunday tea with another pirate crew. Neither side particularly outweighed the other, so he just stayed by one wall of the galley, idly lifting weights with one hand and hoping they'd work it out soon.

Kanjuro was on Franky's side. Kin'emon and Momonosuke both wanted to hurry to Wano as quickly as possible. Robin ... Zoro glanced across to where she was watching the discussion with her normal detached, vague interest. Usopp was a little ways off fiddling with a small tangle of gears and metal bits, mostly ignoring the whole thing. Zoro assumed both of them were, like him, not on one side or the other. Most everyone else had long since left the conversation. Law's crew was off running the ship -- he had a feeling Robin and Franky probably could be taught quickly how the thing worked, but he was content just to stay out of their way and keep his swords sharp.

"But Luffy's not here. Why would they even let us close?" Momonosuke asked, forcing his voice into proper tones to sound more _adult_. "We're better off just doing what we intended."

"Ah ha!" Franky said, as though he'd caught the child out. "But we have an in. Our bro Usopp."

He sounded so proud one would have thought Usopp being Yasopp's kid was his idea. But the proclamation did its job -- all three of the men from Wano looked suitably surprised.

"The sharpshooter has a connection to the Red Hair Pirates?" Kin'emon turned toward Usopp as though he maybe hadn't understood quite right. All of them did. Usopp himself seemed to have been lost in thought, since he seemed surprised to see everyone suddenly looking at him. He smiled nervously and waved.

"Usopp's old man is one of Shanks' crewmates," Franky confirmed.

The expression changes were immediate. Kin'emon looked chastened; Momonosuke, wistful. "Well, then of course, we have to go," Kin'emon said. "At least briefly. If it's family, then it's important." And despite the way Zoro knew the kid had to be wanting to hurry, Momonosuke nodded slowly as well.

For his part, Usopp looked like a deer caught in the headlights. He eased to his feet, babbling, "So, I... uh... just remembered something I have to ... start ... back at the workshop ... err... So I'll just..." and then he was away, gone further into the murky interior of the ship, letting the door slam behind him as his footsteps receded.

"He must have something he wants to do before meeting up with his father," Kin'emon said knowingly. "Let us make our request of the captain at dinner this evening."The other two from Wano nodded their agreement. But on the other side of them, Robin stared after their sniper with a pensive look.

________________________________________________

A knock at the door to his makeshift workshop drew Usopp's attention, if not his eyes. Those were fastened on the two halves of the capsule he had carefully packed with the contents needed for what he hoped would be an excellent new sort of ammunition. "Come in," he said as his fingers slowly pressed the two halves of the capsule against one another, holding the pressure steady for a few seconds to let the adhesive set. He heard the door open, heard footsteps enter the workshop, but it wasn't until he was satisfied that the glue was secure that he looked up.

"Robin!" he said, unable to keep the surprise out of his voice. She didn't come to the areas where he or Franky worked often -- he liked to think it was because she respected their workspaces, but who knew exactly what was going on in her mind?

She closed the door behind her, then glanced around the room. He realized belatedly what she was looking for and cast an anxious look over to a couple of boxes that shared the small space, but they were strewn with tiny screws and pieces of metal. There wasn't even a chair he could pull up. On the Sunny it wasn't a problem. Not only was there more space and were there better storage accommodations, but the people who tended to visit him there either didn't mind sitting on the floor or, more often, simply didn't hang around. They just did whatever they came to do and left. But this ship was more crowded, and he'd been lucky to be allowed to set up in what had probably been a munitions locker once upon a time (he wasn't prying into those boxes to check his guess) and so...

She seemed to have come to the same conclusion, since she just relaxed her stance and cast him a vague smile. "I hope I'm not interrupting," she said.

"I was just finishing up," he said, pushing his goggles up to his forehead to try to indicate to her that it wasn't an imposition. "Something you needed?"

Robin wore a long, violet sweater against the chill. The water mitigated a lot of the wild temperature swings of the New World, but it also insulated them from the sun, so the whole ship ran a little cold. He tried to think what might have brought her down here. Usually, if she had something to say, she just called through the door instead of entering while he was working, so...

"Usopp, do you want to approach the Red Hair Pirates?"

The directness of her question should not have surprised him after all this time -- she'd rarely been one to beat around the bush if something was truly on her mind -- but it did. "W... what?" he stammered. "I mean, it's up to everyone, isn't it? I'll just go along with whatever everyone else wants."

She smiled, that knowing, somewhat sad smile she sometimes had. "Everyone thinks you will want to see your father now that you have the chance," she said, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. "So it seems to me that what you want is rather important."

His eyes went back down to the tools arrayed in front of him. He had intended to test this prototype before making more, in case he had planned wrong, in case something went awry. But now, his hands tingled with a need to do something, and he worried that if he left this off for today, the conversation might follow him. He didn't want to talk about this _at all_, but if she was going to press the issue, he didn't want to run the chance of other people listening and joining in. He slid the goggles back into place, picked up another of the little capsules and began measuring ingredients into it. "Well, I mean, we don't want to bother them," he said. "Shanks is really important. Seeing my father would be great, but do we want to interrupt them doing important ... pirate ... stuff?" Jeeze, that even sounded lame in his own ears.

He heard a rustle of cloth, but didn't look up to see if she'd moved again. Silence fell for several seconds before Robin said, "Have I ever told you much about my mother?"

Usopp stilled. "Nnnooo." Talking about the past was something the crew did or did not do according to their whim, and although they'd heard bits of her story, Robin was not the most forthcoming of their group. The thought of her raising the letter of her own past, voluntarily, felt like something strange and rare and precious. 

She made a brief humming sound that he couldn't begin to guess at the meaning of. "She left home when I was young, so young I only had impressions. A face with kind eyes. The ghost of a voice. A sense of safety and love. She left to study the poneglyphs. A terribly dangerous mission, even if the Marines had not captured her. I wonder, each time I find a piece of lost history, whether it was among the places she visited on her journey."

Usopp slowly pushed the goggles back up onto his forehead again and looked up at her. She was smiling, but her eyes watched a memory. His hands carefully put the half-filled capsule down. Something in the moment felt too reverent not to give her his whole attention.

"I had always been proud of the importance of what my mother was doing. But when she came back, I didn't know what to do." He watched her fingers tighten on her arms a little. "This ghost of my past appeared before me, and I was so happy that I couldn't stop the tears. But I was not ... _only_ happy. I was sad. Angry. And I didn't understand why."

"Because she left." Usopp didn't realize he intended to talk until he heard his own voice in the tense air. "She _had_ to leave, but she still left."

Robin's eyes refocused and she looked at him, smiling more wholly and nodding. "I still feel it. I understand completely why she did it. I would have done it, in her place. If I could go back and speak to her, I would _tell_ her to do it." A seldom-heard intensity, full of complicated emotion, threaded into the words. "Which made it hard to accept that it was also OK for me to feel that what she did was unfair to me, even if it was in service of something greater."

He could see the lines she was creating with this story as though they were drawn in lights in the night sky. But his pride rebelled. "I'm sorry that happened, but I don't resent my old man for leaving. I had a pretty nice life, even without him. I had friends, no real responsibilities, my m-"

It wasn't that he didn't want to talk about her, it WASN'T. But something had caught in his throat obviously, just at the wrong moment, and finishing the word "mother" afterward would have sounded silly. Right? That was it. Instead he cleared his throat and continued, "And I got to tell all his stories. If he just stayed home, I never would have turned into the great captain you see before you." He grinned, trying for bravado.

Robin's smile didn't change, but she asked once more, "Usopp. What do you want to do?"

He knew without a doubt that if he asked her to back off here, she'd do it. She'd let him leave the decision to everyone else. She'd let Franky's well-meaning but sometimes overwhelming sentimentality steer them. But somehow that repeated question, and her own honesty and sincerity, cut through everything.

What _did_ he want?

"I don't know," he said at last, dropping his eyes back to the materials before him. One hand reached out for them again, hesitated, then braced on the surface next to it instead. "He's like a hero, right? He's _my_ hero at least, always has been. But my mom loved him and trusted him and never gave up on him, and she _died_ waiting for him." His hand balled into a fist and slammed impotently against the wood to emphasize the word. "I did everything for her I could think of, but I still had to watch her die by myself."

The words seemed to be coming forth of their own accord now -- he wasn't sure he could stop them if he wanted to. His voice felt heavy, tired. He hadn't wanted to think about this. Had done his best not to, for how many years? "She was so sick, but she never lost faith. And he didn't even return after she died. Not even to apologize at her grave. I just wanted him to come home."

Robin's murmur sounded loud in the space. "That must have been hard."

It was. Not as hard as what she'd been through. In the depths of the night sometimes, his dreams conjured images of a Buster Call obliterating Syrup Village in wave after wave of fire and explosions until nothing remained to say that his mother or Kaya his crew or the villagers had ever led their peaceful lives there. The dreams terrified him awake, leading to him wandering up on deck in the depths of night to keep the smoke and fire at bay. But still.

"But you, as you are now. What do you want."

He knew the answer. He just wished it didn't make him feel like he'd gone backward, like a coward yet again. "I don't think I can. He's so strong. So amazing. He's a trusted member of the Red Hair Pirates. Luffy says he was proud to have a son, and I trust that Luffy believes that. But I can't help but think -- what if he's not? What if I'm the reason my mother died waiting for him instead of with him? And if so ... if that's the case, then I have to make sure I'm a true warrior of the sea before I meet him. That if being his son is worthless to him, then at least my deeds and strength won't be."

She waited a few seconds -- he got the impression she was waiting to make sure he didn't have anything more to say, then stepped back to the door again. "I'll let them know," she said. He heard the door open and close again before he looked up, grateful that she hadn't suggested he tell the others himself.

Whatever she said to them, aside from a couple glances, it was as though the question had never come up in the first place. 

And the ship sailed on straight toward Wano.

**Author's Note:**

> So, something about this story feels really rough to me. It's been sitting in my hard drive for almost a year waiting for me to figure out the issue. But having just seen Stampede, I just felt the urge to share something, and I might just be being WAY too hard on this poor little storyling. And I just love these two characters. Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> Edit: I'm not super sure I got this corrected, but it should at least be closer.


End file.
